Follow the argument wherever it leads. Is it possible to educate students on this principle alone? Socrates seemed to think so, even if in practice he sometimes nudged the argument in the direction he thought it should go.

The Tutorial College, a curricular innovation set to make its debut at Trinity in the fall of 2000, will follow the Socratic ideal. But it will join to that classical mode of teaching the more modern element of providing a rigorous and comprehensive education that precedes specialization in a major field. The 55 sophomores in the two-semester program will be housed together in the new dormitory now being constructed on Summit Street, and they will study intensively with the five Trinity faculty of the Tutorial College: Dirk Kuyk of the English department, Adrienne Fulco of legal and public policy studies, Tom Mitzel of chemistry, George Higgins of psychology, and Richard Lee of philosophy.

The Tutorial College is specifically designed to address two central issues of college-level liberal education: what to teach and how to motivate students. Every educator wants to see students become self-motivated with respect to material that touches deeply significant human concerns.

But this goal is hard to achieve. The right kind of motivation is not something external to the activity in question. It is not a threat or a reward or even a bribe, as grades too often are. People feel real motivation when they feel that something about themselves is incomplete so long as the work they are doing is incomplete. To be motivated with respect to one’s intellectual life is to know and feel that one’s happiness depends on being able to think often, and think productively.

Finding ways to motivate students means finding a way to connect their emotions and their desires with intellectually complex questions. Some few students come to college with this connection already securely in place. They are the natural learners, the ones who bring immediate and unearned joy to a teacher’s heart. There are some few others in whom the connection will never be made, and for them there is probably no successful pedagogy. For many more, however, the connection is present in a partial or latent form, usually more or less hidden in the underbrush of other motivations, such as the desire to get through the next stage of life, on the way to material success. These are the students whose energies can be gradually directed to a wider and richer conception of human life, and of their own life in particular. They can be brought to see clearly things they may have only glimpsed, and to appreciate new forms of living and feeling.

In order to redirect students’ thinking in these ways, the teacher has first to know where the old connections are, and how the energies are flowing. This requires attentive listening. The Tutorial College addresses this need by providing each student with a generous amount of individual tutoring with one of the five professors.  Each student will undertake one or more projects tailored to his or her own interests and abilities.  The work will be shared, at various stages, with larger groups of students and other instructors.  The operative question in the instructor’s mind, for this part of the work, is "What can this student, at this time, most profitably think about?"

The question of content is the age-old question of the canon – that is, what the substance of "general education" ought to be.  Every academic with a connection to liberal education has worried, pondered, and quarreled with colleagues about what books, materials, and activities ought to constitute non-specialized education.   The experience in America, at least over the last few decades, points to the conclusion that this question cannot (or will not) be answered by faculty meeting together in solemn conclave, or even over coffee or dinner (especially not over dinner). The Tutorial College faculty have therefore taken the most direct path to an answer, one that totally ignores all theories about What Everyone Really Ought To Know or What is Timelessly Essential.  Our solution has been to assemble a lengthy list of books, dramatic and artistic activities, and samples of scientific inquiry.  Some items (but not many) were dropped after discussion. From the resulting long list we then devised a "Really Crucial List" and a "Not-Quite-So-Crucial-List." The Really Crucial List forms the core of what we call the "spine"-- the collection of material that all the students (and instructors) will read and study over the course of the two semesters.  The spine has five "nodes" which bear the titles Being Different, Freedom and Constraint, Conformity, Internal Mechanisms, and The Pleasure and Risks of Seeking Experience and Knowledge. Books on the "Really Crucial List" include: Four Essays on Liberty, Gulliver’s Travels, Breaking the Code, A Doll’s House, and The Most Beautiful Molecule.

We make no grand claims for our list of books.  Scores of other lists, no doubt, would work as well (we hope) as this one. We don’t need to find the best list – the True Canon. We only need to find one good collection – one that will suit these five professors and these sophomores.

Every student will spend time exploring each of the five nodes. But in addition to this and the individual projects, students also will meet in groups of ten with one of the instructors. In these small groups students can probe issues and questions more deeply and pursue their own ideas. The material in the spine will lay out the argument. Following these arguments and developing the thought is the work of the groups of ten and the individual tutorials.

The groups will differ in their choice of further reading,though they will able to talk to other groups by virtue of work done in the spine. In the groups, students will read papers to each other as they do now in seminars. These groups will be a meeting place for work done by everyone, and work done by each individual.

Finally, there is one aspect of the program to which we have attached the highest (and sometimes most anxious) hopes. Indeed, in the end it may be the most important part of our bold experiment in education, and that is: the students in The Tutorial College will live under a social and academic Honor Code.  The five faculty have drawn up a skeletal document, but the first job of the students will be to flesh it out. In particular, they must select an Honor Council, which will administer the Honor Code.  There will be no RAs in this wing of the dormitory, though the students will be assigned a Residential Fellow. The first set of readings in the spine will focus directly on issues of publicity and privacy, and liberty and constraint. All 60 of us will be faced immediately with the question that joins theory and practical living in the most direct way:  How shall we govern ourselves? Whatever we decide, however we detail the workings of the Honor Code, we will have to practice what we preach. If the Honor Code is successful then it might serve as a model for the whole College.

There will no doubt be some failures along the way, both with the code and with the larger educational goals as well. But we are willing to learn. Nobody has a theory or a scheme. What we have is our experience, and what we fervently hope is our good sense. It is the students, of course, who will determine the success of our efforts, and who have the most at stake.  This thought gives us courage and confidence.  Who better -- indeed, who else -- can we trust but our own offspring, our own successors? They are our future, and we look to that future with great excitement.